Dive Brief:

• Oreo is launching a branded website called gifts.oreo.com to offer direct-to-consumer gifts for the holiday shopping season, according to a company press release. 
• Parent company Mondelez International said the site is part of a global e-commerce strategy that is expected to grow revenue by at least $1 billion by 2020.
• Neil Ackerman, global director of e-commerce at Oreo, said in the release that the company's goal is to become a leader in e-commerce snacking by piloting a flexible, agile supply chain that gives the brand more direct interaction with consumers during the holiday shopping season.

Dive Insight:

Branded e-commerce, particularly tied to seasonal moments like the holidays, is emerging as a trend that allows CPG companies to combine fun, engaging digital content with original product lines. Cheetos also recently launched a luxury holiday catalog, with an online shop offering cheeky items such as $20,000 jewelry, along with more affordable products including clothing, furniture and perfume.

The Oreo site is a follow-up to a similar effort from Mondelez last year in which holiday shoppers could order personalized packages of cookies. Clearly, CPG brands are searching for the right formula for building direct relationships with consumers in the digital realm. 

If the Cheetos rollout last month was a litmus test for this sort of marketing effort, Oreo can be optimistic about its gifting site: About half of the products in Cheetos's luxury line sold out within the first few days of the site going live, and not just the cheap ones either — it might be harder to nab that $20,000 "Eye of the Cheetah" piece than one would expect.    

Oreo’s e-commerce website allows visitors to make purchases for people without having to know their address for shipping. As long as shoppers have a mobile phone number or email address for gift recipients, Oreo will handle reaching that person for the delivery details, showing that the brand is all-in on creating a seamless buying experience. 

For now, the site serves as sort of direct-to-consumer pilot test limited to the holidays in the U.S., but Mondelez International will use insights and knowledge gleaned from the experiment to expand its e-commerce program globally.